Since it is an era with well-developed information technologies and a blooming electronic industry, various different high-tech products are derived from computers, and the mobile communication is developed rapidly. All these technologies and products are indispensable to our life and shorten the time and space between people. As the present electronic computing products (such as mobile phones, personal computers, notebook computers, laptops or servers, and other computer devices) are getting more popular and extensively used, the market competition becomes increasingly severer.
The aforementioned multi-functional electronic computing products require powerful central processing units (CPU) or other processors (hereinafter referred to as processor) to control the performance of high-speed computation and data processing of the electronic computing products. Therefore, the processor is the center for controlling the operations of the whole computer, and thus the processor is known as the heart of a computer. In general, a processor includes a control unit, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), (wherein the “control circuit” as described in this specification refers to both control unit and ALU), a register and a memory unit. When a computer system starts operating, the processor reads the instructions and data of an operating system from the memory, and the ALU computes the data and saves the result back to the memory, and the circuit designed on a motherboard communicates with other components or peripheral interfaces to achieve the purpose of data processing. Processors generally come with different designs and functions based on different hardware architectures including data/instruction formats, allocations, decoding, interfaces and operation methods.
However, these powerful processors may fail for their limited life cycle without any warning in advance, not only causing tremendous inconvenience and trouble to users, but also interrupting the executing program and resulting in a data loss. As to the servers of a large corporation, the failure of a processor without any warning in advance may paralyze the business and the whole operation of the corporation, and the damage incurred is much larger than we can imagine.
In view of the foregoing issues, traditional computers usually record time in a basic input output system (BIOS) for controlling the processor during its use after the computer is booted. The BIOS is stored in a memory (such as a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS))of the computer, and then the time recorded in the CMOS is read for computations. The use time of the processor can be calculated by the number of operating hours of the computer. Since the time recorded in the BIOS can be changed freely by software, users may not know the actual use time of the processor, and such time gives no guarantee to users who purchase the electronic computing products. Furthermore, the use time stored in the memory relies on electric power, and the memory cannot save a new accumulated use time during a system crash or a power failure, and thus an accurate use time of the processor cannot be provided to users effectively. Obviously, it is an important issue for computer manufacturers to find a way of designing a processor capable of alerting its life expectancy and a method thereof, so as to effectively and accurately provide the actual use time of a processor and prevent people from altering the use time, and facilitate users to take appropriate preventive measures before the processor exceeds its life cycle.